It was a busy summer. We filled our time with mini road trips, exploring our town, trying new restaurants, and browsing through flea markets. We spent a weekend in Oklahoma City to watch my little sister to compete in the American Quarter Horse Youth Association World Show on her birthday. She did awesome. I launched a new local magazine, while working a job I already had. I said “see you later” to a dear friend who moved to the east coast.I read a lot of magazines and found a few new favorites. (If you’ve never read Texas Monthly, you should find yourself a copy right now.)

But, I’m really excited for fall.

Our plan for fall is to spend time at home, resting and enjoying the things we have. I’m ready for all the great things that fall brings: county fairs, cooler weather, fall festivals, sweaters, and pumpkin spice lattes. I’m going to plan “free time”. I want to spend time learning, doing things just for fun and finding new inspirations.

My sister qualified for a world horse show this summer. She’ll compete against about 160 horse-person teams in Oklahoma City on August 5. Her summer has been filled with a lot of practice time, but she took time for a mini photo shoot in her horse gear. We had fun and wrapped everything up about two minutes before it started raining. And in a few weeks, Dustin and I are going to venture across Oklahoma to watch her compete.

August 5 is also her birthday. Competing in a world horse show is a pretty cool way to celebrate 17 years. It’s an exciting time.

My husband and I love trying out local restaurants. A few weeks ago, we went to the Aviary Cafe and Creperie for some couple time. It’s a wonderfully cute bird-themed crepe restaurant in downtown Springfield. I love the decorations – there are umbrellas hanging from the ceilings, bird cages, and a lot of classy vintage things adorning the walls and windows. The food’s pretty great too.

I love that Dustin visits girly restaurants with me without even mentioning they’re girly. He’s wonderful.

After my last post, I took some time to think about this blog, what I would like for it to become and what’s feasible to fit into my life right now.

I enjoyed the photo challenge, but as I shared in my last post, it’s not really practicle for my life right now. Living With the Birds is going to be a photo journal. My new goal is to share at least three posts each week with photos from my adventures.

It’s kind of like the photo challenge, but at the same time it’s really different.

Almost the entire time I’ve been blogging here there have been several excellent photos to share one day, and the next two days will be somewhat bland. The new goal of Living With the Birds has taken that into consideration and evolved.

I’m helping launch an online magazine and a print magazine. (Two totally different magazines with two totally different subjects.) It’s fun, exciting work. And it’s exhausting and time consuming. My husband and I just started running. It’s really hot out, so it kind of sucks. But it’s also great bonding time, and we both feel great when we’re done. So mostly it’s wonderful. I also just discovered Grey’s Anatomy, which is substantially slowing down progress on all of the above.

And with all of those projects* blogging and for-fun photography have somewhat fallen by the wayside. I haven’t fogotten about them. I’ve still been thinking of ideas for fun posts, I just haven’t had time to actualize those posts. And, I kind of haven’t been taking a picture every day.

I’ve been thinking of ways that I can make this blog work, with my now-limited free time. I’d thought of abandoning the photo challenge completely. I’d thought of a few replacement series. I’d thought about abandoning Living With the Birds. Everything made me incredibly sad and discouraged.

And then yesterday my husband interviewed a woman who has lost 200 lbs.

The advice she gave him: Take things one day at a time.

We’re human. We make mistakes. Sometimes we don’t follow through on things we plan to. Even with the best of intentions, sometimes we don’t have time, or we’re tired, or we come up with some other excuse.

Sometimes our goal is to run three times a week, and we go a week and a half without lacing up our tennis shoes. But messing up doesn’t mean you have to quit. That doesn’t mean you can’t run your heart out (not literally) the next week.

We need to learn to take life, and our commitments, one day at a time, because no one is perfect and no one is on their A-game every day of the year. And sometimes when things aren’t working out, instead of getting discouraged and quitting, we need to adjust our plans so that we can still acheive our goals.

So I’m following that advice. I’m adjusting my plan to make this blog, and this photo challenge workable for me.

The photo challenge is no longer going to be about taking and sharing one photo every day; that’s not really possible for me right now. I’m not quite sure what the photo challenge is going to evolve in to. I’m in thought about it. Maybe I’ll set a number of photos to take each week, or maybe I’ll come up with something else. I’m open to suggestions.

I’m not quitting. I’m evolving, and I’m taking life one day at a time.

*Yes, watching Grey’s Anatomy is a project. It’s how I watch TV; I’m a very active participant in everything I do.

I have a thing for old books. They’re fun to read, and they’re fun to decorate with. A few months ago, I read a blog post about making a journal out of an old book. (FYI: This is from one of my favorite blogs, and I’ve not added it to my Internet Favorites list yet, so you should check it out.)

So of course, I went through my apartment, looking at all my old books and picked out the perfect one to journal-ize. A children’s book called Mishmash and Uncle Looey was the winner. I made the journal some time ago, but I kept the pages I cut out for a later project.

Yesterday while Dustin was computer-ing I picked up the stack of pages and cut out our letters. I didn’t have any plans for the letters, but Dustin liked them and suggested framing the letters individually with black frames. So that’s our plan.

And that’s the story of how Mishmash and Uncle Looey became an accidental wall art DIY.